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I started fighting fires in ’87. I like to look at an example of the Dude Fire and that was like twenty thousand acres, it blew our minds at that time being a very large fire, and nowadays we’re seeing some four hundred thousand acre fires.

Randy Anderson Superintendent of the Snake River Hotshots.

Fire is not inherently “bad” for ecosystems. In fact, most land plants are well-adapted to fire at some frequency and intensity, and some even require fire to grow and regenerate. The negative impacts of wildfires now, however, derive from a “wicked” combination of changes in ecosystems, increasing numbers of people building their homes in fire-prone places, and increasing temperatures and drought.

Thomas Swetnam Regents’ Professor of Dendrochronology
Director Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona.

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When you have something like 45 million acres of trees killed that affects just everything. It affects wildlife, it affects water, it affects fishing, agriculture, and of course all those dead trees are no longer going to be sequestering carbon. What they’re going to be doing is releasing carbon. So it’s almost like you get this feedback that you know it warms, the trees become stressed, the beetles do better, they kill a lot of trees, but then that releases more carbon, and that affects everybody.

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